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Flemish government asks citizens for information only once

Citizens of Flanders were repeatedly asked to provide the same information when they applied for various government services, leading to wasted effort, high cost and data duplication.

The Flemish Government decided to ask for information just once then make it available to various departments through a common e-government back-end platform. DXC Technology specialists helped build this data exchange platform based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Eliminating data duplication

Six million residents of Belgium are Flemish and with 70 different government agencies, the Government of Flanders was repeatedly asking citizens to supply the same information when applying for a wide variety of services, from benefit payments and college grants to bus passes and building planning permissions.

To streamline the process, the government decided to collect the information just once and then make it available to all layers of government. Not only would this make life easier for citizens, it would reduce the amount of time taken to collect and verify information, would do away with hundreds of paper forms and would eliminate lost or duplicated data. It would also simplify an unwieldy data collection process, avoiding conflicts which often occurred when the same information was collected from more than one source.

Data sharing platform called MAGDA

After delivering an initial assessment and roadmap, the team of government employees and DXC specialists embarked on an application transformation project to design and build a state-of-the-art, inter-agency data exchange platform that would re-engineer the government’s IT environment to increase responsiveness and quicken the pace of change.